Why Flying Sucks

Okay, so it's a tired old subject, but it always delivers. Two days ago I flew the unfriendly skies and once again met Man's Folly head-on in the form of the TSA cops who keep us all safe from 4-ounce bottles of shampoo. In light of recent bombings in Boston, specifically those two crazed individuals who had eluded the law for years despite being on CIA and FBI watch lists, I was in no mood for their childish shenanigans implying that I might be a terrorist. But there I was anyway, stripping down to almost my skivvies, along with the rest of the traveling public.

The thing that bugged me the most, besides them "confiscating" and "discarding" the unopened bottle of water they found in my purse, was how seriously those folks go about their dumb business. The woman in charge of me fairly barked that she had to "inspect" what was in my hand--it was my boarding pass and they specifically had instructed me to hold onto it. Then she had to "clear some suspicious areas"--namely, feel the zipper on my cargo pants and fondle my breast underneath the piece of jewelry on the shirt covering it. She could see it was a decorative pin, but she had to feel it anyway. All this nonsense was performed after I had stood inside the giant x-ray machine holding my hands over my head and with both unshod feet squarely inside the big yellow footmarks, having my internal organs nuked. Naturally there was nary a smile on anyone's face; instead the mood was as somber as if I were about to unload a magazine of ammo into the crowd.

I offered to just take off all my clothes and in fact started to, which caused the lady to shriek, "that's not necessary!" Still, she never cracked a smile or let on that the whole business is ridiculous. Only I knew that deep inside my carry-on bag was a really big bottle of hair conditioner, way over the legal limit.